Qualcomm, GloFo star in chip supplier ranking

Peter , 3/28/2013 6:18 AM EDT

IDMs and fab-lite companies suffer as pure-play fabless and foundry companies are the star performers in a 2012 ranking of chip suppliers from IC Insights.LONDON – A ranking of the top 25 worldwide semiconductor companies by sales, covering ICs optoelectronics, sensors and discrete devices, from market research firm IC Insights shows that Globalfoundries increased sales by 31 percent and Qualcomm by 30 percent. Qualcomm broke into the top five (see figure 1 below).

Foundry TSMC remained in third place but increased sales by 18 percent getting closer to Samsung and Intel, which both saw sales decline. Although both Samsung and Intel are making first steps to enter the foundry business the former was weighed down with memory sales and the latter with a focus on processors for the lackluster PC market.

In total, the top 25 semiconductor companies’ sales declined by 1 percent in 2012, two points less than the total worldwide semiconductor market decline of 3 percent.

By geography the top 25 includes 10 suppliers headquartered in the U.S., seven in Japan, three in Taiwan, three in Europe, and two in South Korea.

IC Insights has also supplied a ranking of the same 25 companies ranked by annual growth (see figure 2 below). It is notable that lower order of that ranking filled with companies that experienced a double-digit percentage fall in sales includes a number of European and Japanese companies.

It is notable that GlobalFoundries with a 31 percent increase in sales and AMD with a 17 percent decline are at opposite ends of that ranking in 2012. AMD was the original parent of Globalfoundries and has been its primary customer. IC Insights interprets the success as an indication that Globalfoundries has achieved success in attracting additional IC foundry customers such as STMicroelectronics, Freescale, Qualcomm and others.

The inclusion of foundries in such rankings is contentious because it means that some sales are double counted – from foundry to fabless chip company and then from fabless chip company to customer. However, IC Insights said that in a forthcoming update to The McClean Report, marketshare rankings of IC suppliers by product type will also be presented and foundries are excluded from these rankings.